Sea and Stone
by Zipper Whippersnapper
Summary: "Veser Amaker Hatch is a wild child. He's wild, like the sea." Veser character study.


Veser Amaker Hatch is a wild child.

He's wild, like the sea.

Though no one ever tells him that, he knows it – he can see it in the momentary tremor of fear that always shows when he meets people for the first time; that twitch, some more noticeable than others, as they are struck with a sense that the – the what? Not boy, he's _not_ a boy, he's a…thing? Not _thing_, he's half-human at least, damnit – fine, _person_ standing in front of them has as much seawater in him as blood. It took him a few years to be able to notice it, the instinctual dread that flickers across their faces as the knowledge of something alien sinks in, plunges down, down, down to the dark depths of their very core and beats on the shores of their mind, flinging salty sprays of fear and hatred everywhere. When their dull, tiny eyes meet his glowing green ones, when he grins wickedly to reveal his dual set of triangular, serrated teeth, they know that they don't like him – people automatically assume that he's up to no good, that the features that set him apart from everyone else are manifestations of the guilt and wrongdoing that _has_ to follow him around all over the damn place. After all, their lovely, normal, square-toothed kids aren't bad – they've got proportional eyes. They don't have to yell at them to get them to misbehave.

They don't have to beat them, or anything.

He stands on the wharf, waiting for Lee to stop mooning over his mom like some creep from a Shakespeare play and come _pick him up already_, because it's fucking freezing and he's got a brand new set of scrapes and bruises to catalogue and patch up. He thinks for a while, decides that he'll say he got caught in the rain this afternoon and fell down. He tripped on something – slipped in a puddle like the klutz he is – and banged himself up against a fence or a park bench or the sidewalk or something. He's probably used that excuse before, but it doesn't matter; he could probably just tell Lee what really happened and the man wouldn't notice. His tongue runs over his jagged teeth, tastes the cold, personal saltiness of the old blood from his split lip. Brine and blood, he guesses, thanks to mom.

But Lee, that's what he was talking about. Lee would just look sad and confused and slightly concerned for three seconds, give him some band-aids and antiseptic, and go back to sighing and pining away over "Mrs. Hatch" like he always does. The bastard hasn't even figured out that she's a freaking iseal/i yet.

So he's always been alone, just because he happened to inherit some weird-ass eye color and teeth from his mom's side of the family and because the one adult sort-of-friend he wants is also madly in love with his mother. Veser doesn't care, nope, he doesn't; he just lets the remarks and gibes and just plain old _sadness_ roll off him like he's a rock, sitting there on the seashore and dealing with all the crap that the ocean likes to throw at it. Storms, seagulls, sharks and wave after wave after wave – it all just rolls off him like water, stinging now and then but usually doing nothing. He ignores it as it wears him down, lets the muck and salt and seaweed creep over him, like the calluses that have formed on most of his skin by now.

Calluses. He doesn't even remember when or how his skin got so tough.

He rubs at one that's formed over the knuckles of his right hand, the skin feeling like the underside of a seashell or those little sea-stones he used to pick up on the beach when they visited. A brief memory of sun, hot sand, and cold salt water comes to mind, briefly melding with the rain that's still pattering down until he feels like he's actually there again; he's a few years younger and walking down the beach with his family. Dad's off to the side, just far enough away from them that it seems like he's only there to make sure Mom doesn't jump into the water and try to swim away or something; she's staring out over the great wide blueness of the water and sighing, just sighing, and he wants to do something, anything to make it all stop. He doesn't, though – he just walks sort of between them, further back, and picks up the rocks and shells that he notices lying in the sand, half-buried and faded now that they're out of the water. He throws them back into the ocean until his dad yells at him to stop.

It's no big surprise that he hates his father – the feeling's mutual, judging by the amount of bruises that he sports most of the time – but the reason why he hates him has always been a touchy, snarling mystery in their family, almost as much as the missing pelt that mom wants back so badly. Is it because of what he's done, his acting out, his inability to shut up and take the dysfunctional borderline-hate bullshit that passes for love in his house? He doesn't think that's it, not all of it anyway; if it's anything, it's because he's his mother's son _and_ he's a brat. He's that little bit of sea that his father can't control – it's not like he has a pelt for Dad to take away.

Lee's still not here. He turns, leans against the cold raining, and quietly counts backwards from ten.

Still not here. He does it again, counting the waves as the beat against the bulkhead below. Salty air whips at his hood and sweater and he's freezing, fucking _freezing_, but Lee still hasn't shown up yet. So he counts again, and again, and again.

Rocks, right? They don't move just because the waves keep on coming.


End file.
